Tomorrowland

This article is part of a package brushing off the gloom and doom with good green news. Also included are:
Hiring Mother Earth To Do Her Thing: Are capitalists the new conservationists?
Green All the Lawyers: Legal expert Mary Wood on how Lady Justice could tip the scales
In Praise Of Economic Pain: The threat of recession could lead to an environmental boon
Environmental Innovations to Give You Hope
Special Online Project: Mother Earth’s Big Comeback

Imagine a city where renewable energy is generated by helium-filled “solar balloons” floating hundreds of feet above the rooftops. Imagine a city where public transportation doesn’t follow regular routes, but is efficiently directed on demand, via cell phone and GPS technology. A city where walls and fences are replaced with structures, such as shared kitchen gardens or child care centers, that bring neighbors together. A city where commercial systems are designed to generate social capital as well as cold hard cash.

It sounds pie-in-the-sky, but the folks at Urban Re:Vision think that asking people to reimagine the way urban spaces are designed is the key to finding real-world solutions that make city life healthier, for humans and for the environment. The San Francisco organization is using a series of design competitions to solicit new ideas, both viable and futuristic, for overhauling specific components of city living: energy, transportation, construction, commercial and community systems.

The final competition, slated for early next year, will challenge entrants to transform a city block into a more sustainable system. The organization then aspires to implement the winning blueprint as a showcase project in a select U.S. city, which they hope will become a proto­type replicated around the world.